HOME/practice

A very dear friend of mine came to me a few months ago and asked me to help him find some yoga postures and stretches that would help him find more flexibility and comfort in him body. I met with him just a few times and set up a simple 20 minute routine for him to practice. He fell in love with the sequence of postures so much that he practiced daily. The last time we met for a yoga session he asked me to just simply witness him in his practice and to give any feed back on how he might make adjustments. It was an extraordinary experience for me to just simply witness him because what I saw was how he took the postures I gave him and he made them his own. He integrated them into his body and allowed them to unfold into a unique expression of who he is.

A few days ago I received this email from him. It made me cry knowing that this extraordinary practice of Yoga has helped him to find greater comfort and joy in his body:

Roger, you know, I haven’t been to my gym in two months, or longer, not since I’ve been doing yoga every day. Dave and I went over today on our snow day. I started off on this cross-trainer I always do; I can never really get the cross-trainer all the way to the end of the stride (it’s like a cross-country skiing kind of stride)—I can if I really push myself, but it always feels like too wide a stretch for my hips, so I usually stay kind of in the middle.

Well today I got on the machine and WHAM I went all the way to the end of the range of motion so hard that it sounded like I broke the machine; people were staring at me. I thought, ‘there’s something wrong with this machine; it’s too floppy,’ and switched to another cross trainer of the same model. The same thing happened. I switched to the third machine and then I realized there was nothing wrong with the machines. The range of motion was the same it had always been and so was the resistance. What changed, dramatically, were my hips. My hips used to be so tight I couldn’t really move all the way to the end of the range of motion without straining, and now they’re so much looser that unless I pull it back, I go all the way off the edge of the machine.

It’s just miraculous how daily yoga (and I mean a little daily yoga—20 minutes...) changes the body over time!